Eugene Ionesco's play "Rhinoceros" is a paradigm of mindlessness in action, of the bizarre, absurd, and sometimes frightening humor of uncritical thinking. A false or presumed cause is dramatized at the very opening of Act I, the first of a string of fallacies braided throughout all three acts. A standard reading of the play holds that Ionesco's theme is the deadening effect of materialistic bourgeois society. However, it may be more accurate to say that the playwright's concern is with the degeneration of language--distortions and faulty reasonings are heaped up until the comic becomes grotesque and ultimately tragic. The very end of the play returns to the very beginning of logic, the law of identity, and is a perfect ending to lift the audience out of a nearly unintelligible morass of fallacy and obfuscation. (RS)